This piece is part of Scientific American’s column The Science of Parenting. For more, go here.
There was a time when my wife Emily and I spoiled the heck out of our son.
He was our first child and just two years old when COVID restrictions sent nearly everyone into lockdown. Because we were trying to have another, and Emily’s elderly father lived under our care, we spent most of the first half of my son’s second year alone at home.
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We did our best to keep him sated with games and his few buckets of toys. We relied heavily on screen time to keep him occupied while Emily and I did our best to keep our careers afloat. We took countless walks in the woods behind our house, playing in the knee-high water of the small, clear creek that runs past our neighborhood.
As COVID measures started to lift, daycares and kids’ museums in our town were still closed, and playdates ever tricky, as coordinating and maintaining everyone’s level of comfort was a feat unto itself.
Considering everything he had endured and his general state of isolation, Emily and I bought our son a little gift nearly every time we left the house, figuring it was one of the few ways we could keep him happy, engaged and entertained in such an unprecedented time.
It was never anything more than tossing a $1 Hot Wheels car into a shopping cart already piled with at-home COVID tests and N95 masks at the local pharmacy. After all, there are only so many hours of Frozen a little boy can watch each day (roughly five, empirically speaking). This went on through the end of summer, until he was able to start daycare. Though we slowly weaned the process down from every time we left the house to once a week or so, Emily and I suspected we might be doing some lasting harm to our son, creating a little boy who expected gifts every time one of us left the house.
As time went on—and with the help of the amazing caregivers at his daycare program—Emily and I began to untangle this idea. Yet, four years later, Emily and I occasionally see remnants of that “spoiled” little boy, often manifested in selfishness. Though those moments are growing fewer and further between, owing much to his experience of becoming a big brother, our son will still pout or occasionally have an outright meltdown when met with a firm “no,” especially if a new toy is involved. He’s quicker to recover now that he’s getting a bit older. But are these tantrums perfectly normal, or are they because Emily and I spoiled him during the lockdown era?
As he is our firstborn, everything our son does is new to us—we don’t really know what normal is. Is our son forever changed because of the pandemic lockdown or is he now just an average six-year-old; a kid who is figuring out the world around him while displaying some very standard selfishness?
While much of the research on COVID-related isolation is ongoing, in general, isolation isn’t good for children. Social isolation in childhood—when kids are excluded or report feeling lonely —can lead to depression, problems in school, a bleaker outlook on careers, increased body weight and even heart disease.
But as we are now a couple of years out from the lockdown part of the pandemic, some trends are starting to emerge. A study conducted by Columbia University researchers and their colleagues found that babies born at the beginning of the pandemic had slightly poorer social and motor skills at age six months than babies born just before the pandemic.
Another study published in JAMA Pediatrics last year found that children who were exposed to the pandemic between the ages of one and five were “4.39 months behind in development” at age five “compared with those not exposed to the pandemic.” And yet another study, also published last year in JAMA, found that young children exposed to the pandemic were more likely to experience socioemotional delays compared to children in the pre-pandemic era.
As I read through this research, elements like “increased emotional symptoms and self-regulation difficulties” shot out at me. Was my son experiencing such an increase? Did he have issues self-regulating? Or was he, again, progressing as normal? It’s impossible not to wonder. And though the generation of young kids who spent a few months in isolation is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison to children who have had severe and protracted bouts of isolation, it’s hard to keep my parenting brain from straying to the worst-case scenario. After all, it’s often what the parenting brain is programmed to do.
I’m heartened by the fact that my son is beginning to show greater signs of selflessness. He’s always been quick to share his toys, but now my wife and I are noticing how much more readily he accepts no for an answer. I’m also curious to know how much of that has to do with the normal development of a child, as studies have shown it’s around age six that kids begin to shed some of their childhood self-centeredness, to develop more empathy for people and the world around them. It’s at this age, my son’s age, that children’s executive function skills mature, which allows them to better manage their own distress and recognize the feelings and needs of those around them. And so, according to that metric, our little boy is right on schedule. Still, even if he is progressing emotionally, I have to assume that six months of lockdown has left some kind of an imprint on him.
Almost 15 million children were born in America between 2017 and 2020, and 90 percent of brain development occurs before kindergarten. The idea that the world might have a microgeneration of lockdown babies is hardly a stretch. It’s not clear how that will manifest. Ongoing research will hopefully answer these questions once and for all.
But, knowing what we know, I think we can remain hopeful—kids who were in isolation for six months won’t have the same outcomes as children who have been isolated longer or more frequently. Considering as much, the best we can do is hope ongoing research shows that the long-term effects of the pandemic isolation were minimal.
During lockdown, everyone had struggles. For people like me and Emily, parents of young children, it was juggling jobs and new parenthood while trying to keep our baby happy, occupied and developmentally safe and sound. In the end, we did what we had to do to make it to the end of the day in one piece. We indulged our son, knowing full well it might have long-term effects. Now, as we move forward through his life, we are trying to be attuned to his development, to support him and help him thrive in any situation, and, of course, to help him get more comfortable with being told “no.”
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.